TOKYO -- After Fukushima suffered the world’s worst nuclear meltdown since Chernobyl nearly three years
ago, Japanese government officials say the region's food is safe to eat. Problem is,
neither its producers nor consumers trust them anymore.

While
not quite the proverbial breadbasket of Japan, Fukushima was, for a long time, home
to the nation’s fourth-largest farming area and has long supported itself
through the production of rice, fruits, vegetables, tobacco and silk, in
addition to a hefty supply of fish and seafood fetched from its 100-mile
coastline.

Since
the meltdown, Fukushima has dropped from the nation’s fourth-largest rice
producer to its seventh, with production reportedly slipping 17 percent,
according to the agriculture ministry. Roughly 100,000 farmers have lost an
estimated 105 billion yen ($1 billion). Livestock farming once thrived in
Fukushima – until most of its farmers were forced to evacuate after the
meltdown, and 5,000 cattle were ordered slaughtered and the rest were left to
starve to death.

At
a testy meeting last fall between government representatives and farmers from
Sukagawa and Soma, two of Fukushima’s largest food-producing areas, one
Sukagawa farmer noted that the government approves of shipments of food that
test below 100 becquerels (units of radioactivity) per kilogram, lower than its
original 500 Bq limit (and in line with global standards), selling it at
below-market value. But he would not allow his own family to eat the food he is
allowed to sell.

“We
won’t eat it ourselves, but you tell us to sell it to others. Do you know how
guilty this makes us feel? There is no pride or joy in our work anymore.”

But
despite the gut instinct that food from Fukushima cannot be safe, prominent
scientists back up the government, with some noting that early evacuations,
land-restriction and decontamination efforts, together with Japan’s natural
iodine-rich seafood diet, make Fukushima’s food today safer than an average CT
scan.

The
real culprit of Fukushima’s agricultural industry’s woes may be what most
Japanese consider egregious government
lies and obfuscation (most notably, waiting two months before even conceding
the word ‘meltdown’), tight-lipped secrecy around its data and laughably
low-tech decontamination strategies that don’t seem like a match for nuclear
contamination. And compounding the problem is that some scientists agree the
data isn’t good.

Nancy
Foust, a U.S.-based researcher and technology and communications specialist with
SimplyInfo.org, a multi-disciplinary U.S.-based research group monitoring the
Fukushima decontamination efforts, says, “We have found efforts to
decontaminate rice paddies, but hard data on things like before-and-after crops
have been hard to come by. The decontamination techniques so far have involved
either deep tilling to shove the top soil down deep, or mixing in potassium to
try to prevent the plants from taking up cesium.”

And
that’s the rub: Most of the techniques employed in Japan – ranging from soil
scraping (skimming of the first three centimeters of soil and storing it in
massive canvas bags called “ton packs”), to tilling, to power blasting the bark
off fruit trees or water sweeping with Karchers (high-pressure, industrial
strength cleaning machines) – are primitive at best, near-replicas of
strategies used in Chernobyl nearly 28 years ago. Worse, the results of such efforts are often kept secret, or at
least oblique, by the government officials overseeing them.

“All
of our requests for disclosure have been rejected,” says Nobuyoshi Ito, a rice
farmer in Iidate and former systems engineer who has emerged as a widely cited grassroots expert on decontamination. He has been conducting his own
tests with Geiger counters and other equipment to compare results with
government figures, sending them to a laboratory in Shizuoka prefecture for
confirmation. (A technician at the lab said he was actually better informed
than most Japanese government officials on the subject of contamination.) “Even
the Ministry of the Environment, the ones who actually lead the decontamination
work, are unclear, or at a loss to specifically quantify their assessments.
When we ask them about the possible reduction of the rate of radiation, they
answer, ‘We won't know until we try.’” According to Ito, the government keeps
kicking the can down the road, refusing to publicly release its findings,
claiming that they are still in progress.

If
rice and produce are hard to assess, fish and seafood pose an even bigger
challenge. Marine creatures are always on the move, following tides and
currents. “Some fish in one area of the sea are contaminated, others aren't,”
says Foust. “They're having better luck focusing on certain breeds of bottom
feeders. The rock fish, for example, almost always show some level of
contamination, though it’s usually low. They’re reliable, but they don’t show
the extremes.”

The
government botched this test as well, said Foust, displaying samples like octopi, which typically has low levels, to claim all seafood was safe. While natural
iodine from some seafood helps cancel out the radioactive iodine in fast-moving
fish, using octopi as a standard misrepresents localized risk. No one was
fooled, further eroding trust.

So, the fear of Fukushima's food persists. Geraldine Thomas,
Professor of Molecular Pathology at the Imperial College in London, and the
scientific director of the Chernobyl Tissue bank, was asked to assess likely
health effects from Fukushima after her extensive work on thyroid cancer cases
in Russia. Thomas finds the food fear in Japan baffling – a sign of modern and misbegotten hysteria.

“The
most important thing to do immediately after the accident was to restrict the
consumption of locally produced milk and green leafy vegetables, which are
known to concentrate [radioactive] iodine,” she says, as opposed to the
healthy, natural iodine found in some seafood. “This the Japanese government did
very well – in contrast to the Soviet authorities following the Chernobyl
accident. The Japanese continue to monitor foodstuffs, and [they] have imposed
even stricter limits on radiation in foodstuffs from Fukushima prefecture than
we have for our own produce in the U.K. and the U.S.”

Dr.
Ian Fairlie, an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment who
is closely monitoring Fukushima says that Japanese should fear radiation – just
not necessarily in the region’s food. “Contaminated food intakes are a
relatively small part of the problem. People near Fukushima are more exposed
via direct radiation (groundshine): smaller doses also come from water intakes,
and from inhalation.”

Adds
Professor Thomas: “Both the World Health Organization and the United Nations
Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation agree that the biggest
threat to health post Fukushima is the fear of radiation, not the radiation
itself. Personally I would have no worries about consuming food from Fukushima
– and in fact did so when I was in Tokyo last April.”